Publishing accessible documents online

We have a responsibility to ensure any documents we publish meet accessibility standards. This means everyone should be able to get the same information, including those with disabilities. Documents include PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

You should avoid online documents where possible and use web pages as the primary way for publishing information online. This has many benefits:

Accessibility: The templates and content types on the College website meet AA standards. If you follow our advice on headings, links and images your content will be accessible too.

Responsive design: The College website template displays on different screen sizes – from phones to large display screens.

Usability: College web pages should offer a better user experience than someone downloading and opening a document.

Easier to find for users: Web pages have a much higher search ranking by Google than PDF or other documents.

Quicker and easier to update: Once a web page is created, small changes can be made easily. This is much quicker than updating and publishing a PDF.

More control of the truth: Web pages usually have the most up to date version of the content. With documents there is a risk of people sharing old and inaccurate content.

User data: There is much more data about visitors to web pages so you can get insights on how they interact with your content.

Forms and surveys

You should use the College’s form and survey tool, Qualtrics rather than a PDF or word document. Qualtrics forms can be embedded directly on to your web pages.

Writing accessible PDF and other online documents

If you have to publish a document, it should be in addition to your web pages.

A good example of this is the Annual Report and accounts 2017-18. This was created as a printed piece which was broken down into several web pages, to give it the greatest reach possible. The PDF version is offered as the secondary way to consume this information.

Advice for making PDFs more accessible

GOV.UK has some great advice on publishing accessible documents. This includes guidance on creating and converting PDFs and tools and techniques for checking the accessibility.